STARBUCKS AND CYBORG CULTURE
By Sabrina Beram
Starbucks can be likened to a machine, and it demonstrates various implications of cyborg culture on a site-based, local, and global level. The corporation’s success is driven by the same imperative that influences humans to strive towards cyborgism; empowerment through hegemony. The tolls Starbucks takes on society and individuality are similar to current and projected outcomes of the incorporation of technology into an ever-growing cyborgian culture. These include the mechanization of humans, the humanization of machines, and a movement towards monoculturalism. As cyborg culture indirectly functions to redefine what it means to be human, the environment Starbucks provides and the behavior taking place within it is resulting in a reassessment of the meaning of community as it relates to human interaction.
Since the beginning of time, humans have needed religiosity, or a moral code to not feel lost. This stemmed from people’s fear that they were vulnerable compared to other forces, such as nature, that seemed to command them - starving them at whim, for example. Humans wished for some protection, which came in the form of religion through which humans allied with God, the almighty creator of all other forces, including nature. By attending church and claiming a place in god’s palace, people felt mighty like God with his power of God permeating them. When the church became corrupt and its flaws were exposed, humans were faced with the harsh reality that they were not children of a god who may or may not have been contrived, and they were again left powerless with the pressing need for a new form of empowerment. This arose in the form of technology, evidence of scientific godliness. With the implementation of capitalism, a new financial religion through which behaviors were guided by money materialized and technology became the new god. Technology was showcased as a means through which modes of production could be improved and made faster, and humans came to the conclusion that with no god, they could only have a better chance of controlling their fate by becoming superhuman through technological supplementation.
Just as humans gave power to god through hegemony, they now give power to technology by recognizing the supremacy it affords them. Starbucks has acquired much of the power it wields through its reputation as a cutting edge and trendy coffeehouse by exploiting the consumer’s desire for contact with technology. The fact that Starbucks is conscious of this is cited in their company’s 2004 Digital Commerce Strategy plan which claims that Starbucks decided to
“undertake a bold internet strategy [because] …its cafes attract young, affluent, tech-savvy customers -- exactly the sort of people who made [the dot com] boom take off. In 1999, Starbucks estimated that 70% of its customers were Internet users. [In 2001] that figure [had] risen to 90%” (1). Regarding more current affairs, the report states that “Starbucks does use the internet in a clever but indirect way to increase customer loyalty and build brand strength by offering its T-mobile hot spots across the country…The company started deploying the T-Mobile HotSpots in 2002 and set up more than 1,200 of them initially. In a year’s time this number rose to 2,700 which is quite remarkable and truly exhibits how this company is so committed to its customers and to technology” (1). Starbucks incorporated technology into its stores to pull in customers who were growing accustomed to using empowering technologies such as the internet by providing them an environment in which to access those technologies.
Although 90% of Starbuck’s sales are in retail stores, and Starbucks doesn’t need its website for direct profit purposes, in the outline it is still recommended “Starbucks use create incentives
[such as the Starbucks Card] to drive consumers to starbucks.com” (1). This shows Starbucks knows the power associated with the internet and wants to increase its credibility by establishing itself as an affiliated institution. If customers see that the company is online, they will associate Starbucks stores with technology and also Starbucks may be incorporated into the virtual identities via web communities being created by internet users. Businessweek quoted Ken Lombard, Starbuck’s president of Music and Entertainment, stating that he believes Wi Fi technology “is having a positive impact on business, […] bringing customers in more frequently and keeping them in the stores longer, primarily during off-peak hours” (2). Businessweek also asserts that Starbucks is in a “transition to all-things digital” with the installation of kiosks offering music downloads and customized cd’s already set in motion in addition to a plan which includes “HP supplying … CD burners, … printers for the CD covers, the tablet PCs, the digital storage,… servers… and wireless downloads to laptops or portable players” for in store use (2). Interestingly enough, Starbucks started out as a single store establishment selling sacks of coffee beans, sans technology- without even a coffeemaker in sight! This shows how Starbucks has taken advantage of integrating new technologies into its stores and identity as a way of riding the success of the technological revolution, and by acknowledging that technological gadgets and virtual space are worthy of being an integral part of Starbuck’s vibe, Starbucks reinforces the significance of technology in the eyes of it’s customers.
Now Starbucks is one of the world’s most admired corporations and finds itself on Interbrand’s list of the 75 great global brands of the 21st Century. In other words, it is in a position to engage in some hegemony of its own, maintaining hierarchical power through inclusion by acknowledging the presence and significance of comparatively powerless humans through the leadership and generosity. "The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. so people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall! Decaf! Cappuccino!" (3). Tom Hank’s description of the power Starbucks has on people, featured in the 1998 film You’ve got Mail has appeared to have struck a chord in reality.
The article “Starbucks Craze, Culture Rampant” was bold enough to ask the question “But do people actually finish the entire cup of coffee?” to which some employees at a university Starbucks replied, "Some of my friends order lattes and then wait for them to cool off. Then they take a few small sips and throw the rest away…. People use it as a fashion accessory to their outfits. Even the cup holder is for decoration because most of the time the drinks aren't even that hot” (4). One of the employees, who observes these same customers waiting in long lines for a long time on a daily basis, “attributes this sort of behavior to the wave of Starbucks culture that has overtaken every corner of the nation” (4). These on-the-run customers hype up their image with the Starbucks logo, a symbol of affluence (god knows the prices are expensive) and intelligence (as symbolized by the association with modern technology). For them, it is worth the time and money to feel like a part of the club.
In alignment with Tom Hank’s observation, it is my interpretation that many customers indulge their cyborgian desire to play god or design their fate by engaging in the ritual of custom designing their drink with the illusion of being able to express their individual tastes and get exactly what they want. Starbucks certainly offers a large variety of options, but in actuality the chain of selections made within the Starbucks establishment ironically limits individuality as they drink choices are defined in terms of a certain generic type. Customers at Starbucks believe that their drink is specific to their personality like My Space inhabitants think that the design on their webpage background conveys their individuality. In reality, millions of kids use the same My Space backdrop, and millions of people order the same beverage at Starbucks. Individuality is an illusion in a corporation like Starbucks where the tools customers are given to express themselves are limited.
Starbucks prides itself on the consistent experience that its venues offer worldwide. People come to Starbucks because they know what to expect, and one thing they do not expect is a hassle. For Starbucks to run like a well-oiled machine, customers who want to become part of the Starbuck’s “club” must walk the walk and talk the talk; they must conform. Starbucks enjoys smooth transactions and increased productivity by mechanizing humans, coding language in the convention of cybernetics so that communication is controlled. Fabricated terms such as “frappachino” and “venti” ensure a brisk, unambiguous exchange at the counter since programmed clerks take up the orders like a computer comprehends one’s and zeros. Consequently, “[t]o the uninitiated […] long-time Starbucks customers who know their favorites by heart can seem to be speaking a foreign language when they order” (3). As echoed in “Technology for the Factory of the Future,” customers have had to adapt to this “machine” by learning the meanings of the menu terms and assimilating their behavior by ordering with increased precision and speed, eliminating the possibility for and emotional or meaningful human interaction (5). This is quite a change from traditional coffee shops in which it was commonplace for a waitress to strike up a conversation with a guest. Often times it was this element of personality and community that made for loyal customers in the past. Now, as Starbucks demonstrates, it is quite the opposite.
Those who do manage to drink their coffee and do so for the caffeine demonstrate even further how Starbucks mechanizes humans since such customers perfectly fit the definition of machine; a mechanism that can transmit energy to do a specific goal and has an input force which is used to produce something. In the same manner in which humans played god, pumping hydraulic energy into the inanimate figurines in the 1500’s, customers at Starbucks play god by pumping their body full of caffeine. Interestingly enough, this divine notion was apparent from the beginning of coffee use; “A member of the Sufi order of Shadhili mystics is credited with first brewing coffee…[and members] used it to sustain their all-night spinning ceremonies. These "whirling dervishes," as the West called them, attempted to alter their consciousness through ecstatic gyration, and thus get closer to God. Caffeine helped them do it” (6).
The present day abuse of caffeine is done in attempt to overcome the limitations of the human body which has come to be viewed in technological culture as “as a burden, inescapably affecting human life as it demands food and sleep” as it is described by Sally Pryor in the assessment of how her personal experiences as a computer programmer informed her perception of her body as “a vessel for her information-based brain,” after her adaptation to technology influenced her to view herself as a mechanical device (7). This perspective of the body and Starbuck’s caffine consumer’s attempt to eliminate their body’s need for dependency can also be related to the evolution of community. Community originated from animals and humans needing to depend on each other for means of survival. Nowadays it seems that humans are trying to become more independent and self-reliant, especially through the use of aides and tools such as the lap-top, as a show of associated strength and with this the need for other people becomes less significant.
Starbucks does an equal job at humanizing machines by bridging the gap between the digital and the physical. The Starbucks environment is sensual with plush couches, aromatic coffee beans, jazz music, and sometimes even the crackle of a fire. While in most cafes or restaurants with a comparatively rich ambiance, cell phone or lap top use is frowned upon, but in Starbucks it is encouraged. The interior design of the Starbucks on Washington Square Park is a prime example of how Starbucks is conducive to technology. The space is split into compartmentalized areas suggestive of privacy, and lamps like teardrops spill concentrated pools of light straight down in front of where patrons are expected to sit, encouraging customers to stare down at a book or lap top. Flat, wide desks hovering over electricity jacks are fixed with individual lamps for students sitting at opposite ends. Several seats loitering around the area resemble couches cut in half and are obviously meant for individuals as implied in an article on architecture in Starbucks establishments which recalls that, “[an] elegantly curved aluminum wing over the bar and prep area… functions both as a dropped ceiling and sculptural intrusion, redefining the space over the bar and creating a kind of nook. Most newer Starbucks cannily provide such nooklike seating, as well as open areas under high ceilings, providing emotional compression or release as customers move through the space and stake out their places” (8). Along the walls are flat slats that serve as a work surface for customers who are situated facing windows looking out onto the street (as opposed to facing other people).
The place is strategically set up for individuals to come and spend some time with their technology. It is not uncommon to see a teenager sitting alone, talking to a cell phone or a whole line of kids with their heads down, absorbed in their computers or blackberries for hours. At Starbucks, machines are treated as companions. Although in 1995 , Shultz and Olson presented their vision for what a Starbucks store should be like as “a spot where people could gather and talk over a great cup of coffee, a comforting refuge that provided a sense of community, a third place for people to congregate beyond work or the home,” during my visits to Starbucks, I saw less congregation and conversing and more separation and introspection (9). As one article states, “A loud, rambunctious individual who enters into the Starbucks atmosphere of money and intellectualism would realize at once that he was acting inappropriately, and most likely tone down his behavior” (13).
In 2004, Starbucks Vice President Darren Huston commented “I get asked a lot, 'Aren't you concerned about people loitering in your stores, using the Internet, and not buying anything? ... The reality is exactly the opposite. Our most successful stores turn out to be the ones with the most loitering. We think it's great if people want to stay awhile. It creates a sense of community" (2). The jump from the description of community as people talking to people sitting alone fidgeting with machines for hours illustrates the redefinition of human interactions with the increased use of technology and demonstrates how, in light of expanding cyborg culture, a machine-like conglomerate such as Starbucks has lost sight of humanistic values stated in its mission statement including “ things like ‘embracing diversity’ and to ‘treat each other with respect’ which reaffirm the conscious attempt to connect with their customers on an emotional (even quazi-spiritual) level” (10). In a sense, since Starbucks has induced the increased use of technological apparatuses in traditionally social spaces, it has contributed to the deterioration of community, exchanging its emphasis on reality and human contact for the anonymity of the cyberspace universe.
Starbucks also disrupts communities outside the confines of the store with the fusion and distortion of different cultures whose essences comprise its products, with efforts to displace mom-and-pop shops and a thrust towards globalization. When Starbucks moves into an area, wealth is created which encourages sales to affluent outsiders and the displacement of inhabitants with rising property values. A second source of tension within the community is that of Starbuck’s “buying out, or dislocating local ‘mom-and-pop’ coffee shops [… which kept] money in the local economy [and]…where friendly faces were recognized, and orders memorized… For [Anti-Starbucksters], Starbucks' attempt at different and modern has failed miserably. Perhaps because their children can no longer get their crumb cake and hot chocolate from the familiar couple that had been selling it down the street for 50 years” (13). Starbucks is a dominating and successful organization offering 36 types of coffees, presents novelty in the internal environments of different stores while externally blending them into the neighborhood aesthetics, and gives back to the community through social programs. It projects the image that it is in support of uniqueness and variety while stamping out the small, personalized competition. This is much like the adoption of cyborgian prosthetics that seem like they will create diversity by adding new characteristics to the human body when in actuality it makes the threat of standardization viable since everyone may become similar with the same attributes.
The monoculture threat Starbucks poses is applicable on a global scale since “Starbucks has joined McDonalds and Wal-Mart in hyper-aggressive expansion, especially abroad, thus setting itself up as a symbol of the Americanization of the world” (11). In December 2000, after Starbucks opened a store in Beijing, “outraged local media reported that 70% of people they surveyed would rather not see the chain there” (12). While “cross-cultural contamination: the dilution of foreign cultures by contact with America” is a valid concern, an article titled “Starbucks invades the world” points out that “no culture is truly indigenous or untouched by others. Starbucks itself is an American repackaging of Italian coffee culture. Schultz eventually differentiated Starbucks from other American coffeehouses by modeling it on his Italian experience, with certain modifications to suit American tastes. These include chairs for loitering, jazz overhead instead of opera and an Italian-sounding nonsense language (such as "frappuccino" and "tazo tea") that one ex-Starbucks executive freely admits was concocted in a boardroom. This just adds another stage in the international epic of coffee drinking: Starbucks customers, whether in Zurich or Beirut, are drinking an American version of an Italian evolution of a beverage invented by Arabs brewed from a bean discovered by Africans” (6).
Studying how Starbucks has grown from a small company to a major franchise with the incorporation of new technologies into its coffeehouses and corporate identity leads me to wonder if the trends reflected in Starbucks, as considered as a cyborgian entity, might take a hold of society at large in the years to come. Will the homogenization Starbucks has brought about in customer’s language and the coffee business represent the results of introducing technology into the human body? Starbucks made the personal small café treatment evaporate by commoditizing the coffee exchange and experience into a dependable and trendy form, thus putting smaller, more specialized places out of business. This relates to how cyborg technology’s proposed commoditization of individual characteristics threatens to flatten out uniqueness. Through industrial production, signifiers of gender and race, for example, may become available to all people for incorporation into their body or identity. As these attributes become trendy and popular (such as breast implants demonstrate), their traditional purpose transforms by contributing to the construction of a more generic population.
Is the gentrification caused by Starbuck’s invasion of communities and foreign cultures indicative of a future problem in which people with cyborgian technologies overpower those who lack scientific know-how? Cyborgian prosthetics may perhaps create a society run by the rules survival of the fittest or smartest if technology’s power begins to be utilized as a weapon. The growing disparity between the rich and the poor may become a point of great concern in the American free market in which those with money are the ones who have access to the technology increasingly being woven in to the way in which societies operate. With the increased acceptance of technology use outside of work and home, will human interaction wane to the point where strong communities in the physical world become a minority to cyberspace communities? If the evolution of community within Starbucks is any indication, this may not be an unreasonable prediction.
Works Cited
(1) Starbucks.com eStrategy
by Donna Hoffman
May 5, 2004
< http://elab.vanderbilt.edu/Research/studentprojects/Starbucks.com%20%5BChristian%20Haber mann,Andrew%20Mattis,David%20Medvedowsky,Olivia%20Nash%20-
%20May%202004%5D.pdf >
(2) Starbucks Tunes In to Digital Music
By Stanley Holmes
March 16, 2004
Businessweek Online
< "http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/mar2004/nf20040311_7142_db016.htm >
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May 1, 2006
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HYPERLINK
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks >
(4) Starbucks craze, culture rampant
By Vicky Lucia
March 30, 2004
BC Heights News
< http://www.bcheights.com/news/" www.bcheights.com/news/ >
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By James Lawson, John Reidy, G. Frederick Renner, Karen Rosen, Lise Smolak November 1983
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 470 (pg 56-67)
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by Jackson Kuhl
January 2003
Reason Magazine Online
< http://reason.com/0301/cr.jk.tempest.shtml >
(7) Thinking of Oneself as a Computer
By Sally Pryor
1991
Leonardo, Vol. 24, No. 5 (pg 585-590)
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By Lawrence Cheek
April 26, 2005
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Online
< http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/visualart/221538_architecture26.html >
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By Arthur A. Thomson and A.J. Stricklanc
1999
Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases, 11th Edition, McGraw Hill Companies
< http://www.mhhe.com/business/management/thompson/11e/stud_online.html >
(10) Starbucks World
By Devin Page
IneedCoffee.com (©1999-2006)
HYPERLINK
< http://www.ineedcoffee.com/05/starbucks/ >
(11) The Starbucks Paradox by Kim Fellner
Spring 2004
ColorLines, Vol. 7, No. 1
< http://www.arc.org/C_Lines/CLArchive/story7_1_02.html >
(12) Converting the Masses: Starbucks in China
By Geoffrey Fowler
July 17, 2003
Far Eastern Economic Review (pg 34-36)
(13) STARBUCKS: EVERYTHING YOU WANT--it's in our cup: Cultural
By: Mariko Holland, Alexis Platis, and Mollie Warren
HYPERLINK
< http://faculty.vassar.edu/lenevare/2002a/urbs200/themedspacelinks/Starbucks/cultural3.html >
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